Slack

A free version of Teams is now available and it's pretty good. Up to 300 users, free storage, and lots of functionality - and a phantom Office 365 tenant (or so it seems). The nice people at Slack might not like what they see, but there's fierce competition to secure the hearts and minds of those who choose to collaborate using a free platform.

Microsoft might be working on a free version of Teams to take on Slack. As it turns out, not many technical changes are needed to transform the full enterprise version of Teams as available inside Office 365 into a limited version that Microsoft can make available for free, leveraging its existing consumer office services like Outlook and OneDrive.

Microsoft Teams is popular now, but if you decide to use it, how can you move content from other applications to Teams. Getting email into Teams can be done individually and moving documents into SharePoint is straightforward, but moving content from other chat platforms is problematic because of the lack of a migration API.

The Microsoft Teams application is now generally available. Lots has been done to improve Teams since its preview release and Microsoft has made many good updates. Some edges remain for Microsoft to work on, but Teams is now more than a valid competitor for Slack in the chat-based collaboration market.

Much excitement was sparked when Microsoft introduced Teams, their purported Slack-killer, on November 2. Now that everyone’s calmed down a tad and we’ve had the time to get some solid hands-on time with Teams, it’s appropriate to look at what Microsoft has delivered and explore the strengths and weaknesses of Teams.